


Isolation

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Brand X, Gen, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:16:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skinner must find the hope under the silence.  (A post-ep for Brand X)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isolation

The isolation ward hummed.

To be more precise, it hummed at two different and ever-so-slightly discordant pitches. There was the soft low burr of the air filtering system that was jarred by the higher pitched whine-hum of the fluorescent lights.

It made Skinner's teeth hurt.

It was, perhaps, the case that his teeth hurt because he had been grinding them - at least metaphorically - for the better part of the past 72 hours. But they hurt nonetheless.

Damn Scully, his doctors, and every fucking scientist who ever walked the arth.

He paused in his pacing--the tight, regimented steps back and forth across the linoleum--and growled briefly while he considered whether he was being fair.

He shrugged. He really didn't care if he was being fair. If those assholes at Morley hadn't started tinkering with the genetic structure of the tobacco he wouldn't be in this goddamn fix.

And Scully? Well, as far as he was concerned she was culpable too since it was she who had asked the question that had landed him in his current predicament.

"Sir? Have you been smoking?"

The question had come out of the blue in the middle of the hasty debrief she had been leading him through while they were waiting to see if the nicotine treatment would work on Mulder.

He was slumped over in the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the corridor outside Mulder's room, and her inquiry made him snap upright and respond sharply.

"NO! I don't smoke," the 'anymore' left unsaid.

Her nose twitched. "Odd, you just smell so strongly of smoke." 

He thought that he stank of fear and exhaustion, but decided there was some information that didn't need to be shared.

"Well, Weaver blew a lot of smoke at me while I was...uh...negotiating with him."

She stiffened. "Blew smoke...did you inhale it?"

In his tiredness, he resorted to juvenile evasions, instinctively knowing that something was beginning to happen, even if he couldn't quite see its shape. "I did not inhale." Even to his own ears the Bill Clinton impression sounded lame.

She simply stared back at him.

"I don't know, Scully. I may have inhaled some of it...we were in the same room, and I was trying to move toward him slowly."

He watched the blood drain from her face and wondered what it was, exactly, he had just said.

It was nearly the last coherent thought he had for the next 4 hours. Because his words were still echoing in the corridor when Scully was on her feet shouting for a doctor, "stat!" and then he was being hustled down a hallway to the isolation wing.

He was stripped, de-con showered, and tossed into an isolation room nearly before he'd had time to ask, "Why?"

When he finally had a chance to ask, he was sorry he had.

Scully explained - remarkably calmly, he thought in retrospect - that so far as she could determine, Mulder had been infected with the bugs in his lungs by Weaver's second-hand smoke. The bugs' larvae carried into their new home on a deadly airborne vector. So, Scully thought it best that Skinner spend a few days in the very controlled climate of medical isolation while they ran a few tests and assured themselves that his lungs hadn't become the next breeding ground of the mutant beetles.

It had given him a whole new set of nightmares.

In the grand scheme of things, three days was really nothing. Skinner was no stranger to prolonged hospital stays. Nor to the insult of numerous casually cruel medical tests. But somehow this felt different. He felt violated in ways that were difficult to explain.

Maybe it was the inherent indignity of the way he had been manhandled into the ward. For the first 24 hours he'd been given nothing to wear but one of those stupid hospital gowns. 

When he'd utterly refused to get out of his bed the second afternoon on the grounds that he was an Assistant Director of the F. B. Fucking I. and he'd be damned if he'd violate local indecent exposure ordinances, Scully had taken pity on him and talked the hospital staff into giving him a pair of old surgical scrubs to wear.

It would have been more of a victory if she hadn't been laughing her ass off at the time. Of course, she didn't laugh at him to his face, but he knew. He would swear she was getting some perverse enjoyment out of the whole situation. 

It had felt good to lose his temper, though. And, the scrubs did have the virtue of allowing him to get out of his bed and pace.

He understood, of course, that under the buried laughter, Scully was deeply concerned about him. On a subterranean level he realized that her stringent insistence on the comprehensive tests, and the prolonged isolation were not simply her reaction to a perceived public health threat. Rather, he had the distinct impression that she was worried about him, as a colleague and a friend.

It did not, however, do much to make him feel more charitably disposed toward her in the short run.

He saw her at regular intervals throughout the relentlessly boring days. He wondered if she were wearing a groove or a trail in the hallways between the ward where Mulder was recuperating and his isolation ward. He could picture her moving through the halls of the hospital--her steps precise, sure, and focused as she strode unscathed through the sea of doctors, nurses and attendants. He was reminded once more that she was an important ally to have on one's side.

She offered very little news of Mulder's progress beyond vague generalities: "his numbers looked better this morning," "he's holding his own." It was unlike her to be so imprecise, and he finally decided that Mulder's recovery was both slower and more painful than she was willing to discuss. Particularly with him, as he might have to undergo precisely the same therapy.

She was probably trying to spare him bad dreams, which was kind, but a waste of time.

He had long ago learned to scream silently in his sleep. It was one of his myriad traits that had disturbed and ultimately driven away Sharon. It was not a conscious thing for Skinner, this nighttime suppression of sound. He'd always supposed he had learned to do it during his long recovery period after Vietnam. He figured his basic need to scream wouldn't go away, so he had unconsciously learned to scream in a way that wouldn't trigger a nurse waking him up in the middle of the night.

He screamed for different reasons now.

The parallels of the bugs--the ones that Krycek controlled--in his blood and the bugs that were possibly growing in his lungs didn't even bear discussing aloud. His subconscious was doing a fine job of creating lurid and scarring scenarios each night. On the first afternoon on the isolation ward, he briefly entertained a fantasy that the two would stage a war across his body and simply cancel each other out. He could almost see the surreal microscopic battle between the organic mutant beetles and the nightmarish high-tech bugs squaring off for control of his body or the right to finally kill him. It was plausible in a way that only made sense in the twilight zone that had become his life. But he dismissed the thought almost as soon as it was formed.

So he was left to wait. And pace.

He'd tried to convince Scully to let him have a laptop and do the case wrap-up work while he was waiting. His arguments that the larvae would gestate just as well with or without him writing reports fell on deaf ears. He had forgotten, temporarily, how stubborn she could be. It was a trait, no doubt, that served her well in working with Mulder, but it was also extremely annoying in these circumstances.

He needed distraction. He finally cajoled a nurse into bringing him some reading material, but the selection of "literary classics," and out-of-date waiting room magazines that she brought him failed to capture his attention for more than 15 minutes at a time.

Skinner felt his long-cultivated patience raveling a bit more with each passing hour. 

He was hard-pressed to explain exactly what it was he was waiting for, other than definitive word that he was infected, or would be allowed to go home. But  
he could definitely feel himself waiting for something. Something vaguely threatening, but necessary. He hated that sort of ambiguity.

This afternoon, his pacing was interrupted by Scully's quiet knock that preceded a brief pause while she waited for his "come in," before she entered. It was a polite fiction on her part that he had some control over his privacy and might actually refuse a visitor.

She was carrying something rectangular and dark. 

"Finally decided to let me do some work?"

"Sir?" Her confusion seemed genuine.

"I see you brought me a laptop." He nodded toward her hands. 

She looked down at her hands, almost as through she were surprised to find herself carrying something. Then she smiled and grimaced slightly.

"Uh...no laptop, sir. It's an old Scrabble game. I thought you might like to play?"

He just stared at her for a long moment. "Scrabble?" He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something else. "Who were you proposing I play with? You?" It struck him, a half-second later, that the incredulity in his voice was probably undiplomatic.

She looked up again to meet his eyes. "Well, yes. But maybe it wasn't a very good idea. I just know you've been a bit...bored in here."

"I appreciate the thought, Agent Scully, but I'm not sure this is quite what the doctor ordered." He hoped the mild joke would make up for his earlier  
lack of tact.

She shrugged. "I guess not." A brief pause during which he could hear her shifting mental gears. "How are you doing, Sir?"

"I rather imagine that you're going to tell me. The last tissue biopsy they took should have showed at least the beginning stages of the larvae if they were going to develop, right?"

She nodded slightly. "Yes. So far as the entomologists have been able to determine, 72 hours is probably the outside time for the eggs to lie dormant before active development would begin. The good news is that so far your lung tissue seems to be completely clear. But, since we're dealing with an unknown species here..." her voice trailed off and she looked down at the floor for a moment.

Skinner was acutely aware of the hum of the lights, the sound of their breaths drawing in and out, the whir of the ceiling vents. 

He sighed, the sound shockingly loud in the room. "So how much longer will I be under house arrest?" He could learn resignation. He could, he could. He had before.

"My recommendation, and the other doctors and the science team concurs, is another 72 hours. That would put you, we think, completely in the clear, based on what we've determined from the others who died and what the entomologists have learned."

"Another three damn days?!" Her almost-imperceptible flinch was the only indication he had that he'd shouted.

She never broke her steady gaze with him, although her eyebrow raised slightly. "Yes. Another three damn days." 

She seemed to relent about something. "Besides, sir, this may be a blessing in disguise."

He wasn't sure how to react to Pollyanna Scully.

"Why? Because it's allowing me to catch up on my beauty sleep?" He knew that she knew about the night terrors.

"No. Because while we are collecting all these...samples from you, we're, well a couple of us, are getting a chance to look for...other things, and to consider options."

He could feel the damn things chittering along his veins.

"There aren't any options for that, Scully. I'm sure they made sure of that." He was pleased at how dispassionate he managed to sound.

"I wouldn't be too sure. It's a rapidly developing field, and there are literally daily developments."

"I think we're still years away from what they--" he stopped abruptly aware that he was about to betray that he knew more about the things in his veins than he should. Krycek, in his periodic appearances to torment Skinner had let drop a few tidbits about the technology. Not enough to be useful, but enough to convince him that the technology was based on nothing that any mainstream scientist would recognize.

Scully narrowed her eyes at his silence that lingered as he struggled to find something to say.

Finally she said, "Well, I don't have any answers for you yet, but I think we're getting some useful data." He had the sense that she was mildly disappointed in him.

He wanted to express the tired gratitude he felt, but it was drowning in his sense of inevitable failure. His sense that the shadows would always be two steps ahead of them. It was important, though, that he try to let Scully know how much he valued her attempt to help him. 

"Thank you, Scully." He didn't want to sound dismissive. "I...I appreciate it."

"Of course, sir. You know I can't promise anything here. We're really still trying to figure out what we're dealing with."

"I know. But I do appreciate it."

She nodded and turned to leave. Half-way to the door, she stopped and turned back. "Do you need anything?"

"Something to keep my mind occupied."

"I thought Nurse Johnson brought you some reading material."

"It's not quite doing the trick. I'd rather work."

"I know--but you know that we can't bring your files in to this non-secure facility."

He decided to let the excuse pass. "Yeah, I know."

She left him alone to pace. Left him alone with sudden visions of freedom, of a future that didn't include an invisible leash that tethered him to pain and control. 

It was heady. He found himself staring out the window, but he wasn't seeing the newly budding trees. Revenge, uncovering the truth, undeniable action against the shadows, being able to fully and publicly back Mulder and Scully: those vistas suddenly stretched out before him. 

The first thing he would do is hunt down Krycek and kill him. He found himself sneering at his reflection. The niceties of a righteous shoot were not a consideration. He would hunt down the son-of-a-bitch and kill him. And he would enjoy it.

Then he would go after the smoker. CGB Spender, or who ever the hell he was. 

It was an appealing future. Grimly sweet, but he understood that it was not the one he was destined for. He took a deep breath; rolled his head left to right, unsurprised to feel the tightness across his shoulders. 

There was, he knew, only one future for him at this point. A future controlled by those other forces. He sighed - something that seemed to be happening all too frequently these days. He watched the late afternoon shadows deepen and then steal across the lawn, until the dark owned all the grounds. It surprised him that he was still capable of feeling disappointment.

Nights were hard. The hum of the fluorescent lights was lessened, but the ventilation system droned relentlessly on, and there wasn't even the muted noises of the choreographed anarchy of hospital life filtering through to him. There was only the hum of the fans, the beating of his heart, the rasp of the air in his lungs.

And then, tonight, just as he was finally dropping off into elusive sleep, there was a voice.

"Make her stop or I will."

Instinctively at the sound of that voice, he stiffened. Braced for pain, the mindless arc of agony that would begin in his center and radiate out through his limbs and digits.

But nothing. Just the voice from the shadows. A slight awareness of someone else in the room. Krycek's stillness was astonishing. He was a part of the shadow, indistinguishable from the grey and ambiguity of the corners.

Skinner wondered if he was only dreaming. "What?" His voice soft--a test against the darkness.

"You heard me. Make her stop, or I will. And I am not, as you know, choosy about my methods."

He waited to see if there would be more, or if Krycek had said everything he had come to say.

Krycek's chuckle invariably made his skin crawl. "You know, I have been curious about one or two of the...possibilities that her chip offers. She always seems so...inviolate."

Skinner found himself on his feet and starting for the shadow before he had time to think. He had made it half-way to the corner before the first wave of pain hit.

Fuck.

It was always a shock--a lesson newly learned in agony and humiliation. There was no control, no rationality, nothing but the pain overtaking his body. Nothing but the sensations that had no name, merely shades of agonizing orange-grey-olive pain.

It ended after a time. He never knew how long the attacks lasted. They simply started and finally stopped. 

He lay gasping on the floor. 

"You're such a creature of habit, Skinner. What exactly were you planning to do? Defend her honor with a manly display of violence?" Some days it was hard to know which was worse--the pain or the mockery.

He considered a response, but ultimately decided that nothing he could say wouldn't be purely juvenile.

The shadow that held Krycek gave an exasperated grunt. "Look--just do it. Stop her, or I will. There is no room for argument on this. Get her to stop the damn experiments on your blood." He muttered something Skinner couldn't quite hear, and then it seemed the shadow grew less substantial.

He waited a long time after the footsteps receded before he got up from the floor.

He did not sleep that night, thinking about the conversation he would have to have with Scully the next morning. Trying to anticipate her arguments so that he could counter them. Knowing that he would probably have to resort to ordering her, as her superior officer, to stand down from the experiments she was conducting. 

He despised being backed into one more corner. Hated like hell that he would once more be forced to appear weak and waffling to Scully. She didn't deserve that. She was doing what she perceived to be right--both as an agent and a scientist. She would be resentful and suspicious. 

It occurred to Skinner that maybe this was at least half of Krycek's goal--to continue to drive a wedge between the Assistant Director and his agents. To keep the unit unstable, less effective at working together because the players ultimately wouldn't trust each other.

But he understood that he had no choice. He would not sacrifice Scully. So he would have to get her to stop, regardless of what it cost them all. 

It was a good thing, he thought, that he had so long ago come to terms with living in shadow. In being a part of the dark. There is a certain cruel mercy in knowing your exact place in the world. In the knowledge that you have no hope of being saved. 

Just before first light he fell into a light doze, and as he was slipping under the currents of sleep, he suddenly thought he understood, through the haze of half-dream, what Krycek had muttered just before leaving. It seemed to Skinner that the words had been, "Too close, she's too fucking close."

It changed nothing. He would still have to get Scully to stop her experiments. For now.

But he could feel the leash loosening.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: These characters and situations belong to Fox. No infringement is intended, no profit will be made.
> 
> Author's warning: I *made up* all the "science" in this piece. Suspension of disbelief is required....you've been warned. Other notes at the end.
> 
> Feedback will be cherished.


End file.
